#and it'd be really fun if their statblock was more like 5e elves than 5e humans

[anghraine]

I'm still thinking of GW2 as a TTRPG à la D&D 5e, and contemplating:

a) as in my original post about it, the extent to which species impacts stats, because it does seem a bit strange (if mechanically understandable) that being slim and 3 ft tall vs a hulking 8 ft would have no impact whatsoever for martial classes, and that having a magic-friendly culture has no benefits to spellcasters, but veer too far in that direction and you smash into shitty racial essentialism.

b) If I'd try and essentially "map" GW2 professions etc onto something 5e-ish and simply exclude categories that don't fit The Lore (no, you can't be an aasimar in GW2! dragonborn would be super interesting, though).

Some would work easily, at least thematically (warrior -> fighter, guardian -> paladin, ranger -> ranger, thief -> rogue), but others are more difficult, esp spellcasters, since GW2 spellcasting is so specialized—an elementalist simply can't use mesmer abilities, but an Evocation wizard or an elemental-themed sorcerer can use illusion magic, even if an Illusion wizard would be better at it.

c) It would be pretty painful to lose crafting, since it's so integrated into GW2 and so much fun (for me, anyway!). Maybe integrate it into backgrounds (homebrew something to make Guild Artisan more appealing, say, while permitting things like Noble or whatnot—or hybridize backgrounds to some extent à la D:OS2).

d) Actual storytelling, lol. One of the things that had me thinking about it is how the GW2 story is in some ways not very MMO-ish despite much of the game's mechanics being dependent on interaction between players. In-story, there is one Pact Commander—your character, and what they're like is dependent on your specific choices. Other players are ... "adventurers" or something as far as your story is concerned (even as each is the Commander in their own story).

Like, there's not much going on to reconcile your individual significance to the story with the actual experience and interactions that make the game function. Contrast something like City of Heroes in which the premise is was, as you might guess, that you're having adventures in a city with a sizeable population of superheroes that includes you, so the existence of other superhero characters made perfect sense—I much prefer GW2 and its story/vibe/politics, but in that respect COH made more intuitive sense.

It's not a big deal because unexpectedly powerful random adventurers don't seem that odd in GW2's setting, but I've sometimes wondered what the story would be like if they'd taken GW1 more local instead of less (in general, you're operating as part of a larger organization in the GW1 storylines and assisting people much more important than you, usually with the vague assumption that you're one of several people doing this, so this wasn't much of an issue there). Like, speaking of D:OS2, something more along those lines in terms of a protagonist with a party and not "several hundred thousand people simultaneously are and are not the protagonists of this story."

A TTRPG would be harder, in some ways, because making one player the Pact Commander and the other players their, idk, minions would not really work. But I think it'd be doable to tweak the story so it could (no reason there can't be multiple commanders, but like... four or five, not 300,000, lol). Hmmm. Also, you'd definitely have to balance the overarching plot vs the difficulties around railroading—make more use of factions and make it an active choice, say, to correspond to the Orders of Tyria, but also just give players more freedom in general without completing sacrificing the story because someone rolled badly or Leeroy Jenkins'd something.